


Choices

by spacetango



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alistair is a cinnamon roll ok, Blood Mage Cousland, Blood and Injury, F/M, Feels and Combat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5358692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacetango/pseuds/spacetango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wardens Elyssa and Alistair share a quiet moment while on the run from the Wardens. Set during Inquisition, and written for the DA Fic Swap on Tumblr. Elyssa Cousland belongs to my swap partner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choices

Flame leaps into hungry being at the tip of Elyssa’s staff, searing the red lyrium creature rushing at her with its strange bladed arms. A burst of heat: it falls, hissing, its spine twisted, deformed arms akimbo. Hard to believe it had once been a person.

Elyssa pushes the thought and her revulsion away, and turns her attention to the fight further up the narrow path: Alistair holding ground against four more deformed templars, plus three archers on the cliff above. Focus, Elyssa: the intricate pattern of an elemental glyph takes shape in her mind, its delicate lacework channels filling with mana. A glitter underneath the archers’ feet signals the spell’s completion. It won’t be enough to kill them, but it will give Alistair breathing room, and herself enough time to help him dispatch the red lyrium creatures swarming him.

She aims a staff blast at the closest of the former templars and counts: one, two, three. Above, the glyph coalesces under the archers, bursts into vicious shards of ice, trapping them.

“Now,” Elyssa shouts.

With a grunt, Alistair feints, swings his shield in a perfect arc, sends three of the four assailants swarming, and the fourth staggering dazedly backwards. Just enough of an opening.

Elyssa gestures a swift semicircle with her staff blade, directing her mana into the space ahead. The opening is narrow, but if she places the spell just so—

She can’t breathe even though she’s crying out in wounded surprise. A sharp pain blooms in her shoulder, spreads into her chest. The spell, already half formed, flares into jagged icy shards. Only two of the red templars have been caught within its freezing blast. At the corner of her vision, just as the sickening crunch of Alistair’s shield bash signals the shattering of frozen bodies, a stilted shape skitters away.

Damn. Damn her impatience. She should have made certain the misshapen thing was dead.

Up the path, the templars her spell should have iced flank Alistair. He’s turned around at her cry, giving the lyrium-maddened things a break in his defenses.

“Look out.” It sounds like a scream in her head, but it’s not a scream at all. More like a blood-choked whisper, as Alistair falls to one knee, his shield raised against the assault.

Above them, the archers now free from their icy prison, resume their efforts. An arrow sinks into her wounded shoulder, two shatter against the rock face, several more have found their marks in Alistair’s body.

“No!” Her mana roils into fiery shape, a blast that incinerates the archers. Her breath is tight in her chest, and there’s something wet on her arm.

Blood.

She’s bleeding.

With the last of her mana, she wills her focus into a mind blast. There: the skittering creature staggers backwards.

“You,” she hisses, half in pain, half in anger.

She wrenches the arrow out—she’ll pay for it later, she knows—and rides the pain as the blood sings and flows. If the creature was once a man, and it was, then it bleeds. If it bleeds, it is hers. Bloody fist clenched, she finds the thrumming of the blood in the creature’s veins, singing with corruption yet still blood, and pulls.

The creature sways as if drunk for a moment, its bladed arms slack as if suspended from strings. Strings which Elyssa now has. With a hiss and a shimmer, it returns to its shadows. The anchoring pull of the blood tells her the exact path it takes as it darts ahead, a mindless hunger. The last two templars never see it coming, don’t think to even expect it, busy as they are finding openings in Alistair’s armor.

Elyssa uses her staff for leverage to hobble up the path. Her wounds throb with her effort, but at least they save her the trouble of having to cut herself. She might have use of the creature yet. It stands at attention over the fallen bodies of its former comrades. At its feet, Alistair’s blood stains the ground dark, awful red.

“Maker, no!”

Alistair groans as she rolls him over. “Maker, huh? Didn’t figure he’d hold a grudge over my leaving the Order.” He’s taken several arrow hits, a nasty cut to the cheek, and possibly a blow to the temple, but he’s alive enough quip.

She wants to laugh. She also wants to hit him, cracking jokes at a time like this. What she does is calmly say, “Can you walk?”

He grunts. “Define walk.”

“Nevermind.”

“Right. I’ll just keep on bleeding then.” He’s propped himself with his back to a rock, and taken stock of the situation. If the implications of the creature’s silent presence bother him, he gives no indication.

Elyssa tugs at the creature’s strings. They have to find shelter before nightfall. Alistair’s too much of a pincushion for a healing potion, and they can’t risk staggering into Crestwood in search of a healer. Clarel had to have sent people after them, and the less anyone knows of their whereabouts, the better. Just their luck that they ran into a red templar ambush right after dealing with two more scattered groups. They area must be crawling with them. Easier when it was always spiders. Or darkspawn. Although—

She eyes the creature with speculative interest. Barring its deformities, what she can glimpse of its gear is well maintained, just like that of its companions. What they don’t have is equipment packs, which means there might be an encampment nearby. There are enough among them who look human enough to still want a camp. Elyssa gives the creature’s mind an experimental push, is answered with a gibbering roil. In spite of the red lyrium’s ravages, it appears aware enough to understand her intent. There might be something else beyond its chaotic and vicious attempt at thinking, a soft and round shape curled within itself, but it’s not her job to probe any further. Her job is to find shelter, get Alistair there, kill this thing, stop bleeding. In that order.

With a groan caught between clenched teeth, she wills the creature to her purpose. It springs into action like the living marionette it is, darting ahead away from the path. Elyssa grits her teeth against the pain as she helps Alistair to his feet.

“Oh, are we going? And here I was just starting to enjoy the cold hard ground.”

She grunts as she gets his arm around her neck. “I could drop you back down, if you prefer.”

“No, that’s all right. This is good too.” He groans as they move, and she can tell from the tension in his arm that he’s trying to keep as much of his weight off her as he can. “Have I ever told you about my fantasy of nearly bleeding to death while a beautiful woman drags me to safety.”

“This must be your lucky day,” she mutters.

“Every day with you is my lucky day.”

Whatever sharp retort she might have had at the ready dies at his words. Not lucky enough, she thinks, to keep him safe. Elyssa takes a deep breath, tamps down the guilt rearing its head like a viper. She’s the one who decided they avoid the roads. The one who lost her her cool. This is her doing. Her shoulder throbs.

Ahead, the creature follows its orders, leading them toward a sparsely wooded hilly area. No direction she’d think to go, and by all appearances, wild enough to draw no attention unless one deliberately chose to look there. She funnels the blood’s power into her awareness, searching the area for anyone conscious, however liberal such a definition seems to be, and—

Nothing. The camp must be deserted. There certainly were enough of them back at the pass, seven not counting the creature in her thrall, and they’re all dead now. She allows herself to relax a little, gathers her strength for the final push. Around her neck, Alistair’s arm trembles with the walk’s effort.

“Just a bit longer,” she whispers.

He says nothing, and when she sneaks a sideways glance at him, she’s startled by the pale line of his lips, the taut angles of his jaw. Something within Elyssa clenches and unclenches like a palsied fist, even as she helps him to shelter.

The red templar camp is inside a small cave, hidden from sight by vegetation. The creature, its orders completed, once again resumes its silent, disconcerting stance. Elyssa wills it outside, a small distance away from camp, where she deftly blasts it with ice, watching it shatter. Good. She downs the healing potion she’d readied, and hurries back to Alistair.

“Look here,” he says as she enters. He’s opened one of the plain wooden trunks against the cave’s far wall, and taken out its contents: cloths, everknit wool by the looks of it, an empty potion bandoleer such as an alchemist might use, several carved wooden figurines, a jar of the kind that used to be popular for poultices ten years ago, and a small wheel of cheese still encased in its waxed cloth.

“If there’s poultice still in that,” she says with a nod at the jar, “it’s definitely your lucky day.”

His smile belies the pain he must be feeling as he opens the jar. The herbal scent of elfroot cuts the air. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

Elyssa has to will the guilt aside. Her rash oversight led them here: had she checked the creature she just iced was dead, they’d not be this injured. With what she realizes is probably a grim look, she sets about removing Alistair’s arrows, his armor, dressing his wounds with the jar’s contents. He’s known her long enough to just let her work in silence, and the gratitude she feels for this concession—she knows Alistair too well not to recognize the effort he’s making not to fuss over her—only intensifies her guilt.

She hands him a healing potion once she’s finished, watches him drain it. Color comes back to his face, and his gaze slowly loses its glazed character. The evidence that he’ll be all right is the sign her body needed to feel its exhaustion, but still she can’t bring herself to collapse the way she wants to.

“I need to clean up,” she says with a briskness she doesn’t feel.

“I thought I saw a spring just beyond the cave.” He’s on his feet already. “I’ll get you some water.”

“Alistair, wait.” She’s not sure what she wants to say. The exhaustion of the last few months pools in her limbs like lead. “Where are we going?”

“We aren’t going anywhere right now. I am going to get you water in that bucket there, and then, after we’re rested, we’ll continue on to Redcliffe. But that’s not what you mean, is it?” And when she takes too long with her answer, because there’s no answer she can give, he adds, “Of course you mean going metaphorically, which is too bad, because metaphor and I are like oil and water. There was one time when I was at the monastery that we were each assigned a portion of the Chant to contemplate, and about which to write a meditative essay that we would then share. Mine was on some stanza of the Transfigurations, I think. Anyway, when it came my turn to—”

She doesn’t know this story, but right now she can’t parse any of it. “Alistair—”

“I know.” His tone is so gentle, for a moment she thinks she imagined it. “Come here,” he says, and pulls her in an embrace, his arms tight around her. “I’m sorry, Lys,” he whispers in her hair.

She buries her face in his chest and lets the familiar scent of him fill her nostrils. “You were trying to keep the mood light, I know,” she says.

“That’s me, sunshine and puppies and the occasional clever quip. Unless it’s Monday. Then I’m grumpy.” His tone is still soft, and he’s lightly stroking her hair. She could stay like this for the rest of her days. “But what I meant is,” he adds slowly, “I’m sorry—for all this.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t mean as in, I’m sorry I’m responsible. I mean, I’m sorry you have to deal with all this.”

“As opposed to what?” She pulls back to give him a searching look. “Living it up in Orlais? No,” she says before he has a chance to reply, “I’m the one who has to apologize. I’m sorry for earlier. We wouldn’t be in this mess if I’d have checked that— that thing was dead.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Lys.”

“Yes, it was.” It sounds harsher out loud than it did in her head, but now she’s started and she can’t stop. She paces, and the words pour out of her like blood from a wound. “Of course it was my fault. How many times have we been in this situation? Hundreds? Thousands? I know better than to let an enemy, and one I know very little about at that, fall without checking that it’s dead. This isn’t my first sortie, Alistair. I’m not some green recruit who trips on her sword, and yet here we are.”

“Lys, everyone makes mistakes.”

“Stop it. Stop finding excuses. I can’t afford mistakes. A cure’s no good if you’d have died. You could have died. Because of me, you could have died.” She doesn’t know what’s worse: the concern on his face, or the desperation gripping her chest with a cold and implacable grasp. The world is bad enough as it is, but without Alistair in it— She forces herself to get the words out, because if she doesn’t, she’ll go mad: “I’m sorry. I need some time. I’m going to go clean up.”

She stalks out of the cave, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder, and schools her steps into a measured tread. The spring is just barely that, more like a brook than a spring, but there’s enough water, and it’s clear. She peels off her leathers and systematically starts scrubbing off the blood and gore, then just as methodically, teeth chattering and skin goose pimpled in the chill air, she begins cleaning her gear. It calms her, the familiar action, gives her the time she needs to compose herself. To think.

It feels like they’ve been on the run forever, though in reality only a couple of months have passed since she thought it prudent to avoid the Order that’s become her home this past decade. Just in time, too, as only mere days passed after their disappearance that they had to avoid the first of Clarel’s patrols, inquiring after the whereabouts of the Hero of Ferelden. Elyssa scrubs a little harder. Her knuckles are red with cold and effort, and she’s chewing on her lip. The Blight was a lifetime ago. She even remembers it piecemeal, a fragmented back and forth between the endless trudging through Fereldan rain and the heat of Alistair’s body that, in her memory, competes with the campfire’s warmth. The darkspawn and the danger have become commonplace since then. They’re nothing special.

Clarel, though—

Her thoughts turn back to the problem of the Wardens. They can’t hide forever, and Alistair’s notion that his uncle will aid them still doesn’t sit well. Teagan’s priorities will be with Redcliffe, not his nephew and his mage lover, Hero of Ferelden or not. Especially not with the mage-templar war ravaging the countryside. This slow, stealthy progress west can’t continue. She sighs and inspects her leathers, unsuccessfully hoping there’s still something left to clean, because scrubbing gore off is more appealing than what she knows she has to do.

It’s near dark by the time she returns to the cave. She doesn’t have to see his expression to know Alistair spent the time she was gone worrying, but she’s disciplined enough to meet his glance without flinching. He’s rolled out their bedrolls, and portioned their rations. They don’t know the area well enough to risk a fire, and neither one of them is up to hunting besides. Whatever frustration their argument created, he’s taken it out on his gear. His sword, shield, and breastplate are gleaming in the light of a small hooded oil lamp.

“Sorry,” she says lamely.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, listen: I lost it and took it out on you. You’re no green recruit either, and you know your way around here much better than me. I’m sorry.”

A flash of gold as his worry token glides across his knuckles. “Thank you,” he says after a short while.

Elyssa sits by him, puts her hand on his to still the token’s movement. “It’s not today that did it, just so you know. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I did the right thing at the Landsmeet. You could have been king, and kings don’t trudge about in the countryside, covered in mud.”

“Oh, Lys.” He gives a chagrined chuckle, and some of the tension in his arm gives. “You should know better. Mud and I go way back. As for trudging, I do it so well, they’d probably remember me as Alistair Trudgewell. Which is fine for a warden, maybe not so good for a king. You don’t know it, but you saved me from a rather embarrassing historical record. But—” He puts his arm around her and pulls her closer. “But what you mean is that you don’t want me to come to harm. And guess what? The feeling is excruciatingly mutual.”

“I know. I love you.”

“And I, you.”

She worries at her lip again, stops. “Redcliffe won’t work out,” she says at length. “No matter what we did for them all those years ago, they have enough troubles without having to offer us aid.”

“You might have a point.”

That Alistair doesn’t dispute her point is unsettling. It would be easier to articulate her thoughts if she had to argue for them. “I think,” she says slowly, “we have to split up. Avoiding the Wardens might work, but it isn’t a solution. We can’t both look for a cure and try to stop whatever Clarel is doing, and someone has to stop her.” She sneaks a glance in his direction, suddenly worried.

“I thought you’d say that,” is all he says, his glance on the lamp’s steady flame.

“First thing tomorrow I—” She pauses, uncertain how to phrase her intent to use blood magic, before settling on something neutral. “I find a way to send a message to someone who can reach the Inquisition more reliably than you or I. Until help comes, and it will come, you stay here and exercise your superior trudging, make them think we’re still on the run. That way, they’ll still expend resources trying to smoke us out.”

“And you?” His voice has gone quiet.

She draws a deep breath, exhales. “I continue west by myself. By the time anyone realizes I’m not here, I will have had enough of a head start that it won’t matter.”

She waits for a reply that never comes. When she looks at him, he’s still contemplating the lamp, his expression hooded. The token glints in his hand.

“Alistair?”

“It’s a good plan, Lys.”

“But?”

“No but.” His fist closes around the token. “You will find that cure. I know you will.”

Whatever doubts she may have had shatter against his resolve. “I promise,” she says, and turns to him. It takes effort to keep her voice from trembling.

“And promise me you’ll be waiting.”

His hazel eyes are on her, their pupils wide in the dim light. It’s so easy to lose herself in the warmth of his glance, to pretend the long years fighting the corruption in her blood never left their scars, that she is untainted and all of twenty again. Her hunger for him is the same now as it was then, though she is more able to still herself when she wants to rush, to prolong the maddening dance of anticipation.

“Always,” he says.

Does it matter that neither of them knows if they can back their reckless vows? She throws her arms around him, and rakes her nails up his neck, slowly slides her hands into his hair until he makes that needful sound she loves, half growl and half whimper.

“Lys,” he says—

And she kisses his words out of his mouth, presses her body to his as if they were two broken halves of the same being, because the future looms like an ill omen, and nothing, nothing at all, compares to this.


End file.
